by Lauren Elkin
* * *
Once I began to look for the flâneuse, I spotted her everywhere. I caught her standing on street corners in New York and coming through doorways in Kyoto, sipping coffee at café tables in Paris, at the foot of a bridge in Venice, or riding the ferry in Hong Kong. She is going somewhere or coming from somewhere; she is saturated with in-betweenness. She may be a writer, or she may be an artist, or she may be a secretary or an au pair. She may be unemployed. She may be unemployable. She may be a wife or a mother, or she may be totally free. She may take the bus or the train when she’s tired. But mostly, she goes on foot. She gets to know the city by wandering its streets, investigating its dark corners, peering behind facades, penetrating into secret courtyards. I found her using cities as performance spaces or as hiding places; as places to seek fame and fortune or anonymity; as places to liberate herself from oppression or to help those who are oppressed; as places to declare her independence; as places to change the world or be changed by it.
I found many correspondences between them; these women all read from each other and learned from each other, and their readings branched outward and outward in a network so developed it resists cataloguing. The portraits I paint here attest that the flâneuse is not merely a female flâneur, but a figure to be reckoned with, and inspired by, all on her own.30 She voyages out and goes where she’s not supposed to; she forces us to confront the ways in which words like home and belonging are used against women. She is a determined, resourceful individual keenly attuned to the creative potential of the city and the liberating possibilities of a good walk.
The flâneuse does exist, whenever we have deviated from the paths laid out for us, lighting out for our own territories.
exit 53 Sunken Meadow north, exit SM3E, right at the Friendly’s, left by Northgate
you really need a car
LONG ISLAND
NEW YORK
New York was my first city.
When I was growing up, my parents would occasionally drive the hour to Manhattan from Long Island, where we lived, to take my sister and me to the theatre or to a museum. Back then, under Mayor Koch, some Long Islanders did not feel comfortable taking their children to New York. My parents were both from the Outer Boroughs – the Bronx and Queens – and they had purposefully raised us away from the city, in the quiet suburbs on the North Shore. They were part of a mass middle-class exodus. The suburbs better suited their dispositions, in any case: my mother dislikes the crowding of too-proximate neighbours; my father likes boats and boatyards. There are a lot of those on Long Island, and no people on the other sides of the walls and floor.
When we drove in to the city, my parents would become edgy and protective. As we emerged from the Midtown Tunnel, the automatic locks on the car doors abruptly went thunk. ‘Don’t make eye contact,’ my mother would warn as we walked in Times Square. It was the 1980s, and Giuliani’s big sanitisation project was a decade off; Times Square was still gritty, full of strip clubs and junkies and religious fanatics with beards and bullhorns shouting BURNING! YOU ARE ALL BUUUURNIIIIING! But if you ask me, it is far more terrifying today, packed with tourists posing for pictures with young men dressed as Smurfs and Ninja Turtles.
When the time came to go to university, I was not permitted to apply to schools in the city. Off I went then to study musical theatre upstate, not far from the Canadian border, where the frigid cold blew in from Lake Ontario and we walked to class through two feet of snow. When my parents came to visit, they sat in on one of my acting classes and saw what their money was paying for: an activity in which we mimed the throwing, and catching, of invisible tennis balls. A year later, realising I was constitutionally unsuited to showbiz, I transferred to Barnard College to study English. My parents thanked their lucky stars and didn’t say a word against its location, just south of Harlem. I’ve lived in cities ever since.
I felt at home in the crowds, amid the hum and the neon, with the grocery store downstairs open all night, and the Ethiopian restaurant on the corner doing great takeaway; it felt, the moment I stepped outside, like I was actually a part of the world, that I could contribute to it and take from it and we were all in it together. It’s very hard to put words to this, but psychologically, in the city, I felt I could look after myself in a way I couldn’t out in the suburbs.
Now when I go home to Long Island, I find the empty streets of my parents’ neighbourhood terrifying. The very appearance of another human, walking on foot, seems out of place and menacing. I don’t look out the windows after nightfall lest I see someone lurking in the back garden, staring in at me. If the doorbell rings while I’m home alone, I don’t answer, but go and hide in windowless rooms: the bathroom, the pantry. I realise this is antisocial and nearly pathological behaviour. I blame the suburbs.
* * *
The suburban American dream was born on Long Island, the work of a man called William Levitt, who came home from fighting in the Second World War, bought up huge expanses of land on Long Island, and got to work building home after home for other returning veterans. The houses he built in Levittown were (are) of a striking uniformity, the same one-storey rectangle of pre-cut lumber on a concrete foundation with an unfinished attic repeated over and over, at equal spacings on quarter-of-an-acre plots. Cheap to build and cheap to buy, they sold at astonishing rates – in 1949, as many as 1,400 homes in a day. Anywhere from $7,990 (or $78,000 today) to $9,500 ($93,000) would get you a Levitt house – with a washing machine thrown in for free. During the first few years of their existence, Levittown houses had a clause in their contracts forbidding buyers to rent their homes to African Americans.
* * *
‘The history of suburbia,’ writes Rebecca Solnit, ‘is the history of fragmentation.’1 It is also the history of exclusion. Today most Americans live in suburbs (or the giant suburban conglomerates now referred to as ‘exurbs’), having fled the congested, polluted industrial city. They were hoping to get a bit of green and some room to breathe, and to be able to raise their children somewhere, as the saying went, ‘decent’, but in so doing they abandoned the slum-ridden cities to the poor and disenfranchised, and guaranteed a rise in crime that merely confirmed for them their reasons for leaving. It is a story about breaking away from the collective in all its variety to dwell among similar people.
If suburbanites are buffered from encounters with the strange and different by their cars and their single-family houses, this is in part a result of zoning laws which divide towns up into single-use enclaves. Residential, commercial and industrial areas are kept strictly apart, which demands that you drive everywhere as your orbit between work, home, shopping and leisure becomes ever wider. Originally bedroom communities clustered around railway stations with easy access to the cities on which they depended, the suburbs in time became autonomous, spreading away from their town centres. This was mainly the fault of the automobile, which became the pre-eminent way of getting around in the second half of the twentieth century, causing an intricate system of motorways to loop and lace through the landscape, connecting each town to all the others, blurring them into a sprawling mass of units with no easy means of getting from one to the other on foot.
The attempt to accommodate automobile traffic caused the suburbs to look the way they do. In 1929, faced with the problem of how to thread this new kind of traffic through residential areas, a planner came up with a template that replaced the grid layout of the city with the curving streets of the suburb. Self-enclosed ‘neighbourhood units’ were set along these interior streets, and connected by arterial roads on which could be found all the commercial and industrial resources the towns needed. ‘Neighbourhood’ became a buzzword for an almost utopian way of life, in which neighbours could relate to each other and to their community in a more meaningful way, where children could walk to school and adults to work without being endangered by traffic. This is not how the suburbs turned out.
Getting around by car often means residents end up travelling far and w
ide to work and to play, which is not the way to build local solidarity. As home-based entertainments like radio and later television developed, families tended to relish their privacy, and the ‘neighbourhood unit’ was further undermined. And unfortunately, these discrete ‘units’ soon became an excuse for horrific instances of racial and class-based segregation. With no way of seeing how other people lived, I had no access to the real world except through the television, which piped in visions of white suburban families not so different from my own.
The models the culture provided for us were car-bound ones. The television shows in the eighties and early nineties were about mostly white families in suburbs. The Cosby Show – a rare exception to this rule – took place in New York, but the set was no more of a real city block than the one on Sesame Street. Even Full House, set in urban San Francisco, showed the family driving their car (an aspirational red convertible) across the Golden Gate Bridge. Films were set in the suburbs, with occasional forays into the big bad city turning out to be great adventures (Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Adventures in Babysitting) that concluded with everyone safe and sound, back at home in their massive colonials.
In many suburban neighbourhoods, there are no sidewalks.
I worry about my parents when they drive places, and end my phone conversations with them not with love you but drive safely.2 Everywhere they go, they go by car. They have good friends who live just up the block, maybe a five-minute walk, seven minutes at the most, but they take the car to go see them. This is hard to explain to people who don’t live in suburbs: I wouldn’t want them to walk. It would be all right in the daytime, but the street is full of hills and curves and not well-lit; drivers wouldn’t expect there to be pedestrians on sidewalk-free streets. It’s jarring to see someone out walking in the road if they don’t have a dog with them and aren’t wearing a tracksuit. It’s especially unusual to see someone walking on the main arterial roads, where the shops are. If you don’t own a car, you belong to a strange suburban underclass, a caste of untouchables visible only when you are out of place, walking along the side of a road everyone else is driving down.3
* * *
My parents were among the thirteen million people who left the city for the suburbs in the 1970s. The move meant that cities fell into disrepair, as the jobs followed the middle classes out to the suburbs. ‘As far back as 1942, AT&T Bell Telephone Laboratories moved from Manhattan to a 213-acre campus in Murray Hill, New Jersey, which offered more space, quiet, and the same graceful curving roads and bucolic feel of burgeoning suburban divisions,’ Leigh Gallagher explains in her book on the suburbs. ‘But the ’70s saw the beginning of an exodus of blue-chip companies from the cities that would continue for decades: IBM moved from New York City to Armonk, New York, GE to Fairfield, Connecticut, Motorola from Chicago to Schaumberg, Illinois. By 1981, half of office space was located outside central cities. By the end of the 1990s, that share would grow to two-thirds.’4
And that is how my father built up his architectural practice, designing steel-and-glass headquarters for those companies on the off-roads of the Long Island Expressway. My father’s hero is the German architect Mies van der Rohe, because his buildings are reasonable, symmetrical, clear, simple. In that spirit my father built some of the nicer-looking buildings on the Island, many of them industrial or commercial, their form and space and use all carefully balanced. He has done what he can not to blight the landscape – even won awards for some of his designs – but he is constrained by what his clients are willing to pay. One of the things he is most proud of is that aside from their aesthetic appeal, his buildings work. They don’t leak, and they don’t fall down. You’d be surprised how few buildings you can say that about.
I can’t remember a time when I didn’t think about buildings, about spaces and their meanings. I grew up measuring my height against rolled-up plans for buildings; the tools of my father’s trade were my childhood toys: drafting tables, cut-out plastic triangles, compasses, coloured pencils. My father taught me to be sensitive to environment. Perhaps this is why I have never felt at ease on Long Island. I’m not from a town like Northport, Huntington or Port Jefferson, with quaint clapboard houses and historic main streets lined with haberdashers and fishermen’s pubs. We lived two miles south of those places, but a small distance makes all the difference. Our town coagulates around Jericho Turnpike, a six-lane main drag featuring strip mall after strip mall, functional eyesores thrown up in the 1970s and 80s for no money at all, home to garages, car dealerships, gas stations (really anything to do with your car), along with tattoo parlours, long out-of-business Chinese restaurants, Haven Pools, Crazy Diamond, a place where you can buy a gun permit, the Dix Hills Diner, Puppies Puppies Puppies! Grooming 7 days a week. A drive east or west takes you past flat-roofed garages divided from a flat sky by telephone wires strung pole to pole; lone brick buildings surrounded by asphalt where SUVs and family sedans nose in and back out; faux chalet roofs, faux Tudor facades; the blue-topped IHOP; the red-topped Friendly’s; cinder-block buildings whose sans serif font signs advertise FURNITURE, HAND-WASH, BILLIARD, RITE AID. I know exactly what the inside of that bank will be like: it will smell of carpet, there will be fluorescent lighting, Formica-plated desk furniture and swivel chairs.
* * *
* * *
It’s not pretty, but it’s home.
* * *
These buildings exist to house the small businesses inside them, but just barely, like bomb shelters. You get in, you do what you need to do, you get out. They are life-draining for the people who work in them, and a daily misery for the people who visit them, though they may not realise it. Marc Augé calls them ‘non-places’, and they are unfortunately the defining spaces of the late twentieth – and by all appearances, the twenty-first – century in America.
What we build not only reflects but determines who we are and who we’ll be. ‘A city is an attempt at a kind of collective immortality,’ wrote Marshall Berman in an essay on urban ruin: ‘we die, but we hope our city’s forms and structures will live on’.5 The opposite is true in the suburbs. They have no history and don’t think about the future; very little there is built to last.6 Posterity is irrelevant to a civilisation living in an ongoing, never-ending present, with as much care for the future or sense of the past as a child. In his classic 1961 study The City in History, Lewis Mumford describes the naivety of the suburbs, which sustain in their inhabitants a ‘childish view of the world’, a false impression of security, if not an outright political apathy.7 Terrible things happen elsewhere, but never here, not now, not to us. It’s the most natural parental instinct to want to give your children a better childhood than your own; but the generation of city dwellers who invented the suburbs blew past ‘better’ in their pursuit of an impossible social isolation. It is as if they were trying to give not only their children but themselves the childhood they never had. The suburbs present the world to their children as if padded in felt, as if life were something gradually accumulated through commercial transaction, store by store. Often American literature and films about the suburbs feature children and adults alike losing their innocence, surprised, unprepared, for how terrible life can be: The Virgin Suicides, American Beauty, Revolutionary Road, Weeds – all of these ask not only ‘is that all there is?’ but ‘is there really that, too?’
I feel angry when I drive up Jericho, looking at these provisional structures. Don’t we deserve better? Humans don’t just thrive no matter where you put them. Environment matters. Environment is determinative, constitutive; it makes you who you are, it makes you do what you do. My father’s best architecture teacher, Louis Kahn, used to tell his students to think like the beams, feel like the beams, what’s pushing you in, what’s pulling you down, and that’s how you think through a building.
That’s the way I think through the city.
* * *
It would have been nice, when I was growing up, to be able to walk somewhere. In our town there was no place t
o gather, no downtown, no town centre. When I was in high school we hung out at the Dunkin’ Donuts in an industrial park, which mysteriously stayed open until around ten at night even though all the other local businesses were closed by then. There was nowhere to walk or bike to from my house except the shopping centre on the corner of Plymouth Boulevard and Jericho Turnpike, which Google Maps tells me is 1.6 miles away, a 31-minute walk. This sounds right. It was a bit far, but worth it if only to get somewhere. There was a video store (a place of as much freedom as the library, where I familiarised myself with the canon of eighties comedies like Fletch, Airplane!, Beverly Hills Cop and Splash) and some kind of massive five-and-dime store called Cheapo Charlie’s or something to that effect, where I bought tons of candy – that powdered sugar stuff in multiple colours you ate with a hardened white sugar stick.
We felt cut off from places. In the very early mornings, shuffling into the kitchen to let the dog out into the backyard, in the cotton wool of dawn, I could hear the faint sound of a train crooning into Kings Park station, a couple of miles north of us. I loved that sound. That we could hear a train reminded me that we were located somewhere; it lent coordinates to our suburban limbo.8 There’s a way out of here, I thought. I could take a train.
* * *
The first time I was on my own in the city was my first year of university. I took a Greyhound bus down to visit a friend who was studying at NYU; she had class my first morning, so I was left to my own devices in Greenwich Village. Two hours to myself and I could go anywhere I wanted in the entire city! Did I want to visit Central Park? Or one of the museums? Or see what Times Square was like on my own? I’d never before felt really and truly independent. The city seemed so huge, every street its own option. I walked out onto 10th Street and stopped in my tracks. Which way was – anything? There was a church on the corner. Was that east? Or west? I had it in my head that I wanted to go west but how could I know which direction that was unless I started walking, and I didn’t want to waste a minute of time, I wanted to go where I was going, even if I didn’t know where that was yet. I ventured towards the church and hit Broadway. I ventured a little further and found Fourth Avenue. I didn’t even know there was a Fourth Avenue. I retraced my steps and went round in circles trying to find the St Mark’s diner my friend had taken me to the night before. I think I wound up spending the morning in the Barnes & Noble at Union Square.
